The only way to break through was to surprise her. Pop a question into the conversation, Jeopardy!-style.
“Ma. Random Questions for two hundred. Why do you eat everything out of cans and jars with a cocktail fork?”
I remembered Sunshine glancing up at me from her desk. There was a look on her face, I could still picture it, of, what, dismay? Annoyance? I smiled at her and rolled my eyes, thinking we were in collusion—me and my annoying mother who called every Thursday—but now, here in the time of rejiggering of memory, I thought, Maybe it was you she was annoyed with, Clara, for being snotty to your mother. Silence on the other end of the line.
“Time’s almost up, Ms. Winter. Why cans, why jars, why a miniature fork?”
“Because.”
“Because why?”
But that was it. Silence.
Why didn’t I talk to her? Why didn’t she talk to me? Why did we leave so much unsaid, back then, and still? Now, so many years later, I felt Sunshine and Brown looking at each other over my head, which was bent. Telepathy. She’s hiding something, they were telepathically telling each other. We have to make her talk.
* * *
“The Fearsome is so cool, though,” Brown said. “So tough and so funny and so . . . herself. It’s like my parents—they’re the gracious hosts, the witty conversationalists, and I adore them, but when I compare them to The Fearsome and the way she talks, there’s a tiny element of bullshit. Teeny tiny. But never with The Fearsome. Why the tension?”
“I’ve already told you,” I said. “She’s a secret-keeper. I’m still convinced she was behind Asa breaking up with me.”
“Your high school boyfriend?”
“Yes. But she wouldn’t talk about it. Just like when I was little she wouldn’t tell me who my father was, she wouldn’t answer any questions about my twin sister. I mean, I was a kid and I had a thousand questions and she didn’t answer any of them.”
“Well, the truth was pretty ugly, wasn’t it?”
“So? It was still the truth, as opposed to lies of omission.”
Neither of them looked convinced. But what would they know? Parents who adored them, parents who thought they were great, parents who were not hiding anything. Whereas Tamar was a different animal entirely.
“Everyone’s hiding something, though,” Sunshine said. “Everyone’s got secrets. Don’t you think?”
“I do. Have you forgotten how I earn my living? What is Words by Winter if not an exercise in secrets?”
You would think that people could write their own messages. You would think they could find a way to unburden their hearts to each other. You would think that in this enormous world full of words and the limitless ways to put them together, people should be able to figure out how to say what needs to be said. But you would be wrong. Words by Winter fulfilled three to five word requests per day. $100 x 3 = $300/day x 7 days a week (no days off in the world of words) = $2,100/week x 4 = $8,400/month, which was more than enough to live on, much more, at least in the places where the wordsmiths who work for Words by Winter had chosen to live thus far, up to and including Old Forge, New York.
Not that there were wordsmiths, plural. There was only one wordsmith, singular, and that singular wordsmith was me. I was the Winter of Words.
“How go the wintry words these days, by the way?” Sunshine asked.
We were sitting at their big wooden dining table. Dinner was finished. We were playing Jeopardy! and taking turns drinking thimblefuls of limoncello from actual thimbles, taken from Sunshine’s needlework bag, every time someone won a round. Sunshine made her living by crocheting fruit and vegetable hats for babies, multiple hats a day, and selling them online. She had taken up crocheting the first time she had cancer, during those long hours of chemo, when she got sick of reading and sick of not moving. When the cancer came back she taught herself how to make baby hats because they were quick and cute and cheery and she could knock one out in less than an hour. When it came back again she set herself a speed goal: three per hour.
Now she was unstoppable. She was crocheting one as we played. From the red and green look of the thing it was a future strawberry. Parents sent photos of their babies wearing Sunshine’s hats: little strawberry and radish and apple and scallion hat–baby photos, magneted to Sunshine and Brown’s refrigerator the way photos of their own babies would be magneted, if they had any babies. Which they didn’t. Strawberries were most popular.
“Booming,” I said. “The word business is to Clara Winter what baby hats are to Sunshine Rourke.”
“You would think that people could write their own goddamn thank-you notes,” Brown said, the same thing that he had been saying ever since I started my word business.
“You would, but you’d be wrong. And they’re not all thank-you notes. Thank-you notes comprise only a small percentage of Words by Winter output.”
It was my habit to use clinical-sounding terminology, like “comprise only a small percentage” and “output,” when talking about the business of words. Clinical terminology kept things simple. Straightforward. Sterile. Clinical terminology avoided the messy, the painful, the please-help-me-this-is-too-hard-to-handle part of the job.
“Isn’t it awful, though, sometimes?” Sunshine said. “Don’t you ever feel wordless yourself and start fumbling around, trying to figure out how to say what needs to be said?”
I slammed my palm down on the table, which was what we did in lieu of a buzzer. Whoever slammed their hand down first got to answer the clue.
“Words for sixteen hundred,” I said. “Answer to Sunshine’s question. What is yes?”
I was cheating, giving both the clue and the answer, but there had been many thimblefuls of limoncello by then and the game had devolved into a non-game. Yes was the right answer, though. It was harder than you’d think to write one hundred perfect words, one hundred words that would convey sorrow, or sympathy, or love, or regret, or any one of a thousand other longings.
* * *
They had a test for it, a test for the gene mutation. What was necessary, before they would test an asymptomatic relative for eFAD, was a confirmed gene mutation in a parent or sibling. eFAD was caused by any one of several different gene mutations on chromosomes 21, 14 and 1. PSEN1, found on chromosome 14, was the most common.
Translation: before the neuroscientists would consider testing me for the genetic mutation that would virtually guarantee my developing early-onset Alzheimer’s, my mother had to be tested for the mutation. Which she had been. PSEN1, you were identified in the wild, lurking in the woodland trails of my mother’s body. A searchlight was shone upon you and you could hide no longer.
“Clara, I am obligated to tell you that if you are considering being tested for one of the genetic mutations, you will need pre-test genetic counseling.”
Dry. Official. Formal. But the look in the doctor’s eyes was none of those things. By now we were comrades, fellow soldiers on the anti-Alzheimer’s footpath. He waited for me to say something. He knew me well enough by now to know that testing was something I already would have thought about, pondered, lain awake at night monkey-minding my way through the various ramifications. Maybe not the monkey-mind part. But the thinking about, the pondering—that much he had already guessed.
I nodded. He took that as a sign to continue.
“You’d first have a telephone call with the genetic counselor in order to assess if you’re a candidate.”
“Which I am because my mother has a confirmed mutation.”
“Correct. So the counselor would explain the procedure, the cost, the challenges and logistics of the test itself”—he paused again, I nodded again, he continued—“and then, if you wanted to pursue it, you and your family members could schedule an office visit with the counselor.”
All this I already knew, and more. An office visit where my family members and I would talk about our experience of the disease in my family, what we would do differently if we did in fact have a mutation, how our spouses or signi
ficant others and children and possible future children and colleagues and bosses might feel about it. The possible implications for health insurance and life insurance and long-term-care insurance. The possible loss of hope for our future if we had the mutation, and the equally possible, according to those who had been tested, relief. Because then you would know. You would know. If you wanted to know. Did I want to know?
“Okay,” I said.
“Okay . . . ?”
“Okay and thank you for the information.”
I looked at him, he looked at me, and between us passed the understanding that I had thought long and hard about being tested and that I had come to no conclusion and that if and when I did come to a conclusion—to test or not to test—I would let him know. He nodded. We stood up. I left and walked down the hallway and pushed through the double doors out to the parking lot and double-clicked the key to open the door of the Subaru and got inside and laid my head against the cool, cool vinyl of the steering wheel.
Because what part of any of it applied to me?
Spouse, children, siblings, aunts, uncles, boss, colleagues: no and no and no and no and no and no and no. There was no “our” or “we.” There was only me.
* * *
It was early afternoon at the View Arts Center in Old Forge, an overcast September day. A poster sign was set up out front: me holding a copy of The Old Man in both hands with the caption SEE OUR QUILT EXHIBIT! MEET AN AUTHOR!
“There’s a school field trip due any minute!” the woman at the reception desk said. Her voice was exclamation-mark-y, like Brown’s when he was excited. Maybe she was the one who had made the poster. “They’re coming down from Saranac just because of you. Big fans of your book, apparently!”
“How old are they, do you know?”
“Third grade. Still little and cute!”
A table was set up underneath a huge hand-stitched white quilt hung against the far white gallery wall. White on white, almost but not entirely disappeared. I sat on the table and watched as the children filed in, teacher in front and room parents behind. Sit on the floor. Fold your hands. Shhh. Third grade. Still little and cute, which made it worse if it was a day when it was hard to look at little, cute kids. Like the boy whose shirt was buttoned all the way up to his neck. Or the girl fingering the butterfly clip in her hair. They took you in, absorbed you through their eyes, trying to figure you out. You and your place in the world.
“Do you think that’s her? The writer lady?”
“No. Her hair’s different from the poster.”
“It’s still her, though. I’m pretty sure. Yeah. It’s her.”
The children talking about me were sitting three feet from me. They stared directly at me as they talked, in that way that small children did, as if I couldn’t hear them.
“You’re right,” I said. “It’s me.”
At the sound of my voice they were instantly stunned into silence, eyes big and round with shock.
“What are your names?” I said. Writer Lady had spoken. I waited for them to emerge from speechlessness.
“Jamie,” one finally whispered.
“Candace,” a girl said, and then she said it again. “Candace with a K.”
Candace transformed itself in my mind into Kandace. A small boy with a mullet looked up at me sadly and said nothing. Mullet Boy. His eyes were dark and unblinking.
“Tell her your name,” Kandace snapped. “It’ll freak her out.” She poked him with her pinky. Why a pinky instead of her pointer finger? Poke.
“It’s a really weird name!” Kandace said.
Mullet Boy drooped. The space around him widened a fraction of an inch. Think fast, Clara.
“Did you guys know that weird means unconventional? Which is a great thing to be.”
Kandace twitched. She didn’t want weird to be a good thing. Mullet Boy took a deep breath, a strength-gathering breath. He was going to do it. He was going to tell the writer lady his unconventional name.
“My name is Blue Mountain,” he said, then squinched himself into a tight ball and hauled his shoulders up to his ears.
“See what I mean? I told you it was weird! His parents are hippies!” shouted Kandace. “Want to know why the hippies named him Blue Mountain? Because he was conceived there! Right on top of Blue Mountain!”
“What does ‘conceived’ mean?” Jamie said.
“It means that his parents did it on top of Blue Mountain!” Kandace was louder and louder and louder. One of her internal engines had spun out of control.
“Did what?”
“IT!”
Jamie looked confused. So did the boy next to him. So did Kandace, come to think of it. I stood up and raised both hands in the air, flat, and then floated them down, hoping it might work in a Shhh, children kind of way. And it did. The entire room went silent.
It could make me cry, if I let it. All those children, those little, cute kids—they didn’t and couldn’t know what was ahead of them, what life would bring their way. Did you? Did I? Did my mother?
My messed-up heart kicked into gear and began to race. From beat, beat, beat to beat-beat-beat to beatbeatbeat to beatbeatbeatbeatbeatbeat in a fraction of a second. A familiar faintness crept through me from the head down. My fingers stole up and pressed themselves against the side of my throat. This was a bad one. Two-hundred-plus beats a minute. Maybe more. A cardiologist had told me years ago that at the point that “the abnormality” began to “interfere with the normal course of living,” then I should get it “taken care of.” Quotation marks kept grouping themselves around the words as they floated by the bottom of my brain, because what exactly was an abnormality, and what exactly was a normal course of living, and how exactly did wires threaded up your veins into the middle of your heart and then killing off part of it mean getting it taken care of?
The racing and fluttering in my chest and in my throat filled my eyes with stars, but I was standing there in front of them and I had to get through this.
Fake it, Clara.
I sat back down on the table. That way I wouldn’t pass out. Breathe. Focus. My thudding heart, the ocean sound in my ears.
“I have a question for you,” I said. “Do you want to know what it is?”
“Yessssss!” they called together, in the way of small children.
“Think way back, will you? To when you were little.”
When you were little made the adults look up and smile at me. We were the ones who knew that the children were still little. The kids didn’t know they were still little.
Unless they weren’t. Maybe little doesn’t exist. Maybe we don’t want to believe there wasn’t a time when we weren’t thinking about our place in life and what we wanted our lives to be. When we weren’t wondering about the meaning of it all. Maybe we want desperately to think that we once had a few years when things were easy, when others were taking care of us, when we had no worries.
Clara, shhh.
“Can anyone remember something you were afraid of, way back when you were little?”
Hands shot up. Thunderstorms. Dogs with giant teeth. Bad guys with guns.
A small boy with a pierced ear sitting in the back raised his hand. “Can it be something I’m still afraid of?”
“Sure.”
“I’m afraid of going into a store with my mom, and then I get separated from her, and I never find her again.”
Jackpot. Lost Mothers for $1600. The Daily Double. The children moaned and held hands and shook their heads. The adults grimaced. The room itself began to shrink, all of us arrowing into our insides, alone with no mother beside us.
Ma.
I pictured her in the place where she lived now. I pictured her in the passenger seat of the car after our meeting with the doctor. I pictured her alone in the house she raised me in, packing up everything but the books and giving it all away.
“Kids? Can I tell you a secret?”
They all nodded. They all needed a secret, something to bring them out of
the woods and into the sunlight. My heart hammered away in my chest and I knew that I would have to lie flat on the table once they were gone and wait until it reverted to a normal beat.
“I used to be afraid of losing my mom too,” I said. “And guess what? I still am!”
I looked from one side of the room to the other in a we’re-all-in-this-together, we’re-all-scared-of-losing-our-mothers kind of way. Then a cell phone alarm went off, meaning that the writer lady half hour was over and it was on to the arts and crafts room. The adults began to shepherd the children out, but not before nodding to me, each of them, in a sober kind of way. They had seen through me. They could tell that something was happening in my life, something I had vowed not to talk about but couldn’t help talking about, in a sideways kind of way.
* * *
The duct-taped-shut Keds size-nine shoebox was hidden in the middle of the middle stack of the books-as-coffee-table. When I pictured it, I saw the expression on the Amish woman’s face when she handed it to me. I saw the way she shook her bonneted head when I tried to give it back to her. The knowledge that the box was here with me, buried by books but right here in the middle of the one room of my one-room cabin, was unsettling. An unasked, unanswered question. Be brave, Clara.
It took a little unearthing to get to it. Once the shoebox was out, the stacks were lopsided, which was also unsettling. Shifting Little House in the Big Woods and Farmer Boy and The Long Winter from their original stacks to the middle one evened things out again. Symmetry was crucial to the structural integrity of the books-as-coffee-table.
I picked up the shoebox and carried it out to the porch and set it down on the little table next to my chair. I looked at it and it looked back at me. What could be so light that it weighed almost nothing? Then I went back into the cabin and brought Jack and Dog out to the porch with me. Calling in the reinforcements.
“Let’s see what we’ve got here, men, shall we?”
Never Coming Back Page 4